


Do Not Try Shoddy Witchwork At Home (We're Tired of Dealing with the Demon-Hunters)

by ephemeralblossom



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Fae & Fairies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-15 10:15:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28686978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ephemeralblossom/pseuds/ephemeralblossom
Summary: “I found it in an old book. It said it would put an end to your greatest trouble.”“Sounds like a fairy wrote it,” Linette said, promptly. “Exactly like something my Aunt Morgaine would say. For humans’ greatest trouble is always their petty little lives, and that demon will certainly put an end to yours.”
Relationships: Female Supernatural Creature/Female Human Unwisely Dabbling In Witchcraft
Comments: 5
Kudos: 18
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	Do Not Try Shoddy Witchwork At Home (We're Tired of Dealing with the Demon-Hunters)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NachoDiablo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NachoDiablo/gifts).



“Do you have a death wish, human?”

Linette had not intended to speak aloud. Indeed, she had been merely passing through this deserted forest glade on her way to a midnight revel, busily spinning a plan to wreak mischief with her friend Shailyn. Humans had not crossed her mind; these years they were everywhere, but few possessed the eyes to see fairyland, so they were irrelevant.

Yet though her gaze had slipped heedlessly past the hunched figure on the forest floor, it had been arrested by the shoddy witchwork circle in progress; and though she cared not for the mayfly lives of humans, still the peril that crouched formless in the aether seemed a bit harsh to unleash on one.

“Who are you?” the human said. Something appeared to be wrong with its throat, as the words were hoarse and choked. Humans had harsh voices next to fairyfolk, but this one’s was – heavy with tears, Linette thought. “If my father sent you, you can go to hell.”

“I have not the least idea who your father is, young person,” Linette said, tartly. “But if you finish that mess of a summoning, you will be eaten for breakfast by a demon more powerful than has been seen in these parts for some centuries.” She thought for a moment. “Or it may simply wear your skin. Some demons prefer that, you know.”

The human whirled. “Who _are_ you?” 

“If you can see me, then you already know.”

Few humans _could_ see. In the olden days there had been more changelings, and more fairy blood in human veins; nowadays most fairies were like Linette, disinterested in the jumbled frenzy of the human world, and as a result the two worlds had largely diverged. Fairies could walk unseen through Times Square, and leave only the shiver of the fae touch whispering across the skin of the humans they brushed against.

This human, however, was staring straight at Linette. “You’re a – I don’t know. Not human.”

“Certainly not,” Linette said. 

The human still stared at her.

Linette sighed. This was why she seldom talked to humans. It always took so _long_ to get any decent conversation out of them. 

But there was something about this one, beyond the tears and the atrocious summoning circle and the demon waiting to devour its soul. It was tall, and well-featured for a human, with a magnificent nose and eyes that were as green as spring’s new leaf. 

“What are you called?” Linette asked. Perhaps they should start with the basics, before she returned to the theme of _don’t try to do witchcraft until you know enough not to summon hungry demons who will feast on you and then go rampaging through the countryside_.

The human laughed, a bitter snort of a laugh that echoed discordantly in the glade, and said something edged and jangling.

“That is not your name,” Linette said, impatient. “I am not asking in order to do a working on you, so you need not give me a falsehood.”

The human seemed startled, then sat back on its heels, its head cocked to one side. “You asked what people call me.”

The phrasing of human language was damned tricky sometimes. Another reason not to talk to humans. But this one’s voice had softened as the tears receded, and its form was almost as willowy as a fairy’s; for a moment, Linette wondered how the human might dance, if it was bidden to a revel, and shook the thought off. “What do _you_ call you?”

The human paused for a long moment, its hand hovering over the working, abstracted. “Aileen,” it said at last, its voice softer still. “I call myself Aileen.”

This time it was tuneful, the bell-tones of a true name ringing clear. 

“Well, Aileen,” Linette said, “I am Lin, and you are about to make a hungry demon very happy. Who hates you enough to give you that working and force you to try it?”

(She was too wary to give a human her own true name, instincts and long practice united. Lin was close enough to be getting on with, and didn’t risk being made a slave to human whims.)

“No one _gave_ it to me,” Aileen said. It didn’t seem to fear Linette, more to its folly; but perhaps its misery was too far gone for that. “I found it in an old book. It said it would put an end to your greatest trouble.”

“Sounds like a fairy wrote it,” Linette said, promptly. “Exactly like something my Aunt Morgaine would say. For humans’ greatest trouble is always their petty little lives, and that demon will certainly put an end to yours.”

“Is there truly a demon?” Aileen did not sound convinced.

Linette shrugged. “You will have to trust me. Otherwise go ahead, be dinner.” Curiosity, now awoken, won out. “What trouble did you hope to put an end to?”

Aileen made a gesture, small but sad. “I don’t think I really thought it would work.”

“Well, let that be a lesson to you not to go around trying to do witchcraft you don’t understand, because sometimes it _does_ work,” Linette said, but her heart wasn’t in it. She came a little closer. “But truly. I am behind the times. What trouble ails you humans this century?”

Here in the moonlight, she thought, Aileen was beautiful. Not as faeries were beautiful; that was a different sort of beauty, beyond humans’ reach. But humans could be beautiful in their own way, and Aileen was. Aileen’s hair was as russet-red as the autumn leaves, and the short curls called out for Linette to wind a finger through them; she thought the curls would be soft.

“I only wish to be free,” Aileen said, the words an ache. “Not the heir to my father’s political ambitions. He wants his son to be everything he was never able to be, to achieve everything he failed to, to bear his name to the halls of power. And I want –”

“What do you want?” Linette asked, when Aileen cut off. 

Usually she wouldn’t care what a human wanted. She hadn’t cared in some centuries, not since her last human lover, a beautiful young woman with a laugh like birdsong and a clever hand at the spinning wheel. Yet… yet.

“I want to be _me_ ,” Aileen said. “Not what my father wants me to be. I want to dance – that is what I love, to dance and to garden. To nurture a seedling from nothing and watch it grow, until it unfolds its tendrils to the waiting sun…all I want is to be a woman who can live quietly with her music and her plants, and no one to ever pressure me to do anything I do not want to do, ever again.”

It was the smallest of workings that Linette had placed on her, the truth spinning out of Aileen in fairy-speech, her words not harshly human-edged but fairy-smooth. A truth compulsion, for the impulse building in Linette’s breast needed to hear truth before it could be indulged; now that she had the truth, she let the compulsion go as gently as she had woven it.

“Dancing and green things happen to be my passion.” The words she gave to Aileen lightly, almost carelessly; yet they were not. “I don’t suppose you would care to learn a fairy dance?”

Aileen stared at the hand Linette held out to her, then visibly swallowed, her throat bobbing. “I’ve read the tales. If I come with you, I’m leaving the human world.”

“You don’t have to,” Linette said. “You may not care for fairyland. Not all humans do. But I promise you to return you to the human world, if you wish it.”

(She was a fairy, and her promises did not mean quite the same thing to her as they might to a human. If she remembered them, and was in the humor, she might try to redeem them; to a supernatural being, however, time was of less import than to humans, and she might return Aileen after eighty years, in the long tradition of fairy kidnappings. Yet Linette was, perhaps, less cruel and capricious than most of her kind. Most would, after all, have let the demon have its meal.)

“Or,” she added, with a nod to the half-finished working, “you can meet your demon.”

Aileen took a quick look over her shoulder. “Are you saying it’s a choice between you and the demon?”

Linette sighed. Humans. So prone to catastrophizing. “No, dear, it was an attempt at a joke. I don’t intend to let you finish summoning the demon in any event; eventually demon-hunters will have to come return it to the aether, and they aren’t fond of fairies. Our revels would be sadly interrupted with demon-hunters crashing around and shouting.”

“Oh,” Aileen said. 

“So if you turn down my invitation, you’ll have to solve your problems another way,” Linette said. She paused a moment. “Or…”

“Or?”

Aileen was truly very beautiful, here in the moonlight. This was why fairies tended to stay away from humans, or at least the smart ones did. Because this was how you ended up kidnapping a human, and after the honeymoon period they began asking for witchy human things like wifi and indoor plumbing, neither of which Linette entirely understood. Indulge a fancy for a human’s merry laugh, and you ended up with headaches.

“Or,” Linette said, her hand still outstretched, “I suppose I could visit you, here in the human realm. If a glimpse of fairyland now and again might lighten your heart, and prevent you from loosing demons and demon-hunters on us all.”

Linette had always found human faces impossible to read, far from the pure clarity that danced across the faces of her fellow fairyfolk. Aileen looked at her, here in the glade, and Linette knew not what thoughts flitted behind those spring-green eyes and rosebud lips.

After a moment, Aileen said, “When I was a child, I used to dream that I caught a fairy and made it give me wishes.”

“That’s leprechauns, dear,” Linette said, keeping her voice light. Another reason to stay away from humans; they were the world’s most dangerous predators. 

Aileen shook her head. “I only mean…I don’t want to catch you, or to be caught by you. But I should like – I should like to know you.”

She looked down at the witchwork at her feet, then kicked it into the fallen leaves around her. The demon, gnashing its teeth, dissolved back into the aether. 

“Teach me how to dance as the fairies do,” she said, and put her hand in Linette’s.

Linette pulled her close and kissed her upturned mouth, and they danced together in the glade.

***


End file.
